Girls On The Re-Make - Julie Zando - Josephine Anstey

Afterimage, March, 2001 by Cynthia Chris

Not automatic, nor easy, but possible, the characters in The Apparent Trap find each other, and teeter on the brink of losing themselves. If its conclusion leaves the matter unresolved, Zando seems to suggest that old habits of domination, subordination and dependence loom large in their path, but are no longer inevitable. Instead, with any luck, they may evade this "apparent trap" by nurturing the "constant tension between recognizing the other and asserting the self [emphasis original]." [19]

CYNTHIA CHRIS is a PhD candidate in the department of Communications at University of California, San Diego and a long-time contributor to Afterimage.

NOTES

(1.) John C. Welchman, Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the l990s (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 2001), p. 1.

(2.) Ibid., p. 10.

(3.) The Video Date Bank distributes works cited by Gilliam, Halleck and Silver (Video Data Bank at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 112 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60603; (312) 345-3550; www.vdb.org).

(4.) The Apparent Trap and other tapes by Zando are distributed by the Video Data Bank. The tape has screened at venues including "Shifting Positions: New Video Part One" organized by Chicago Filmmakers at the Chicago Cultural Center on January 21, 2000; the "Video Gender Now Videotheque" at the "Console-ing Passions International Conference on Television Video and Feminism" at Notre Dame University, South Bend, IN, on May 13, 2000; and "Interior Images: Video Art/Video Culture" at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., on October 8, 2000.

(5.) Judith Mayne described these intertwined themes in "Julie Zando's Primal Scenes and Lesbian Representation," in Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, eds., Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 346-359. Revised from an earlier version in Quarterly Review of Film and Video Vol. 15, no. 1 (1993), pp. 15-26. See also Cynthia Chris, "Girlfriends," in Afterimage 16, no. 9 (April 1989), P. 21.

(6.) By foregrounding the trends with which Zando engages in The Apparent Trap, I offer this essay as the third in a trilogy that I have written for this publication on the current field of artists' video. See my "Video Art: Dead or Alive?," in Afterimage 24, no. 3 (November/December 1996), pp. 4-5, and "Video Art: Stayin' Alive," in Afterimage 27, no. 5 (March/April 2000), pp. 10-12.

(7.) Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 23.

(8.) Lucy Fischer, "Two-Faced Women: The 'Double' in Women's Melodrama of the 1940s," in Cinema Journal Vol. 23, no. 1 (Fall 1983), pp. 25-27.

(9.) To be fair--at risk of calling Fischer's argument into question--The Parent Trap, like so many Disney ideas, was hardly original material. The script was derived from the 1949 German novel Das Doppelte Lottchen by Erich Kastner, published in English as Lisa and Lottie (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951). The story had already been filmed in Germany in 1950 and in England in 1953. But no version hit paydirt like Disney's. Years later, Disney served up a few made-for-TV movies with the adult Hayley Mills as a mother of twins herself, and in 1998, Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer remade the film for Disney film yet again. This most recent Parent Trap featured Lindsay Lohan as the twins and Natasha Richardson and Dennis Quaid as their parents, with few revisions other than relocating mom from Boston to London, and staging the twins' first meeting within a fencing match, rather than in the lunch line.